Everyday problems and solutions living the life of an adventurous developer at the intersection of .NET and IOS.

29 June, 2009

Microsoft CRM 4.x and WCF

Today I did an integration between an internal system and Microsoft CRM.

I started out thinking that a WCF Client would be the most “professional” solution for the job; but I came to a brick wall going down that road. Googling the matter, led me to some blogs describing the exact experiences I had with WCF and CRM. It does not work! There is some incompatibility between the way WCF communicates and the CRM WebService (std. ASP.NET asmx webservice). Actually it is pretty strange – as communication between WCF and a traditional asmx-webservice normally is no problem. But – not everything is as it seems.

So to communicate with Microsoft CRM 4.x webservices; you need to go down the old “road” and you will reach your destination. When in Visual Studio, you add a “Web Reference” as you normally do; but instead of just naming the reference and pressing “finish” you press the button on the lowest lefthand corner. This allows you to add a traditional webservice proxy instead of a WCF version.